Scary news out of Twitter HQ this week, they’re limiting their API access for whitelisted application to 20,000 calls per hour! This is very bad news for developers of 3rd party applications, especially if they planned on the masses embracing their apps.

The requests are restricted to an IP/User, so I guess we have 2 scenarios

1. Application is on a device (iPhone / PC)
2. Application is on the web

I imagine device applications would be ok. Clients are restricted to 100 API calls per hour though, but all the API calls would be coming from different IP addresses.

Web applications are likely going to be a different story. What if all your API requests come directly from your one web server? 2000 users * 10 requests in an hour isn’t much! Especially if your application is aggregating data in the background which also uses the API.

Twitter really need to focus on this limitation, and try and give developers more. They’re struggling to monetise the site as it is, so restricting 3rd parties from using their product isn’t an ideal scenario for your potential future paying customers.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 23rd, 2009 and is filed under Technology, Twitter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.